CSA Cooking Challenge — A Midsummer Cornucopia

A CSA, which stands for Community Supported Agriculture, is a service that delivers produce from a farm directly to the consumer. I subscribe to Angelic Organics, a farm from Caledonia, Illinois\* (they’re not paying me to plug them, but they’re great!). Each CSA delivery is unique in its own way, and with that comes new culinary challenges. This is part of a series in which I plan my meals using the ingredients provided by my CSA subscription.

*they’re not paying me to plug them, but I can vouch for them so far!

Even as a seasoned home cook, coming up with new dishes intimidates me. I’m not the only one: Grocery stores, with their aisles populated with seemingly infinite options for ingredients, have empowered us with the tools to make just about any dish from around the world. Paradoxically, the wealth of options leads to decision fatigue. Often it discourages me from cooking in the first place. To stave off decision fatigue, I decided to substitute grocery store visits with a CSA subscription. This decision has injected unexpected joy and spontaneity into my life

Every two weeks, I receive a box of fruits and vegetables from my CSA. Each box is different, representing the time and place in which produce is made under. To make things interesting, I’ve gamified this event from a mere acquisition of ingredients into a fun biweekly ritual. I try to make dishes that embody the season by incorporating as many of these ingredients as possible — -along with pantry staples — -and minimizing outside ingredients. Think of it as a Chopped-style challenge but with your pantry and seasonal produce.

Below is an example from a box I received in mid-August to celebrate the middle of the summer.

Unveiling the Ingredients

A few days before picking up my CSA box, I get an email that reveals its contents. Opening this email is more exciting than opening the physical box itself. The latter feels like a formality. The former, however, jumpstarts my imagination. For meal-planning dorks such as myself, this is like Christmas morning every 2 weeks.

For this box, you’ll notice a couple of the usual mid-summer suspects: tomatoes, corn and sweet peppers. Then there are the longer term salad greens in arugula and kale, suggesting a base for salads. Lastly, we’re topped off with classic complementary pieces in red onions and parsley.

The plotting begins.

Dish 1: Roasted salmon with a summer produce salad and pureed corn sauce

The first meal I make with my CSA tends to be centered around the produce that is best used right away. Here, the obvious candidates are corn, tomatoes and arugula.

There are a few options for capturing corn at its peak freshness. A pragmatic approach is to prepare it all the same way and freeze everything. But as much as I love a buttery corn on the cob, I know I’ll get tired of it by the 4th ear. I decided to be more playful.

For this batch, I first lightly roasted all of the corn. I used half of it as a base for my salad, and then blended the other half with butter, honey, lime, salt and pepper to make a simple pureed corn sauce. Tomatoes, pickled red onions, and a lightly blanched\* arugula topped the salad. The only ingredient I took from my freezer tied it all together: a hefty piece of salmon, a perfect canvas for the corn sauce.

A quintessential mark of a good summer dish is how well it extracts the natural flavor of the produce. Here I tried to do just that by exposing corn’s sweetness in different shapes, letting the tomatoes and arugula speak for themselves, and adding tanginess from acids to balance everything out. Altogether, it was a tasty meal, perfect for savoring on a patio on a warm summer evening.

*Maybe they were a touch too blanched. In my defense, these arugula were peppery beasts that had to be tamed.

Dish 2: Kale salad with red kidney beans and pickled red onions

Now that the pressure is off to use up my perishables, I can focus on simpler dishes for the back half of the week. Thankfully, my CSA supplements me with more durable produce such as kale.

Kale’s versatility makes it a vital staple in my produce pantry. You can eat it raw, saute it, or even blend it to an indistinguishable blob with other produce and extract away all of its natural flavor. I’m a proponent of the first two. Serious Eats provides a friendly template for marinated kale salads, in which kale is marinated with olive oil and paired with legumes and acidic components. It’s incredibly easy, perfect for adding freshness to a lazy midweek meal.

For continuity, I like to decide which legume to make based on what would make sense to pair with the next dish. Ultimately that ended up being red kidney beans, but any dried legume can work here. Just throw a bunch in a pot, add some water and spices, then leave it alone for a few hours.

Dish 3: Red kidney bean rice with salsa and sardines

I’ve eaten an unnerving amount of salad by this point and my body is itching for carbs. At this stage of the game, I use more of my pantry to help clean up the final stragglers from my CSA box. All that remained from my CSA box are a couple of tomatoes, red onions, and parsley. I have those leftover beans from Dish 2, some jalapenos from my garden, canned goods, and basically an infinite (which roughly converts to a 20lb bag) supply of rice. This is more than enough to work with.

First, I roasted a portion of leftover tomatoes, red onions and blended them together with parsley and lime juice to make a salsa. I sauteed the rest to use as a flavor base alongside the bean broth from the red kidney bean batch from earlier (always save the bean broth!) to simmer some rice in. While the rice simmered, I peeled out canned sardines with olive oil and fry them until toasty. Lastly, I garnished it all with jalapenos.

Rice and beans is an international staple and guaranteed to be flavorful with minimal ingredients. Meanwhile, sardines with tomatoes is a universally beloved combination, seen anywhere from Sicilian pastas to served with rice in the Philippines. Combined, this unassuming ‘poverty-meal’ is actually a luxurious and flavorful celebration of using whatever-you-have, wherever-you-are.

Finding Joy in Pandemic Cooking

Although Covid has taken away traditional ways of having fun, that doesn’t mean you can’t have fun in other ways. Going to the grocery store used to be one of my simple pleasures. Much of that pleasure has been stripped away amid a pandemic. No longer can I wander the aisles aimlessly each week and make just about anything that I want.

But without needing to find alternatives to the grocery store, I wouldn’t have come up with these CSA challenges and discovered the pleasures that have come with it. For me, these CSA challenges have filled a void of both sustenance and joy. But, joy doesn’t have to come in a biweekly box of vegetables. You can turn any mundane transaction into a fun game — it doesn’t even have to be about cooking!

Cooking under a pandemic has only hammered home the importance of cooking within the context of your environment. Scarcity forces you to be more creative. Working under such constraints has strengthened my appreciation for my ingredients, turned me into a more methodical meal-planner, and injected new life into my cooking. As I finish off the remnants from this box, the calendar has already turned over to the following week. A new mystery box is just around the corner.

On to the next challenge.